4. Epistemology
Epistemology traditionally investigates the problem of how, in the words of Rorty, "language hooks onto the world" and, hence, of what the conditions are for the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge. If we know how words formally relate to things, we possess in that knowledge the most general criteria for reliable knowledge. I want to begin this discussion of a comparison of historism and postmodernism from the point of view of epistemology with a somewhat unusual claim, namely the claim that all epistemology is inherently metaphorical. Let me try to clarify this claim with the help of an example. If we consider the metaphor "the heart is a pump," the metaphor is not a breach of the conventions for the use of literal language, nor a well-considered proposal for changing the name of a specific type of object (in the way we might prefer to use the substantive H2 O instead of the substantive water ). Metaphor is neither an analysis nor a correction of existing linguistic usage. Nor is the metaphor a (medical) theory about empirical reality, though it may have been inspired by the re-suits of empirical research and be actually intended to convey information about those results. Thus, the intellectual effort which the metaphor invites us to make is not a matter of semantics nor one of an investigation of empirical reality; rather, we are invited to wonder how what we ordinarily associate with the word pump could be applied to the heart. The metaphor thus provokes in us the kind of puzzlement that is systematized in epistemology ("how does language hook onto the world?") and we are required by it to do some instant epistemology for this specific case. Just like epistemology, metaphor forces us to take a position that is beyond both language and reality in order to get an idea of how, for the metaphor in question, language and reality hang together.
One might add to this a comment of more general import. The metaphor "a is b " makes us wonder how we can speak about a in terms of b .[67] If we read "reality" for a and "language" for b , it will be obvious that the kind of question epistemology addresses (how does language enable us to speak about reality?) is essentially metaphorical. The secret of both epistemology and metaphor is that they require us temporarily to abandon our inclination to stick to either language or reality—an inclination codified by Hume with his division of "all objects of human reason" into (analytic) relations of ideas and (synthetic) matters of fact —in order to assume a point of view from which the relation between the two can be surveyed.
This insight into the metaphorical character of the epistemological enterprise permits the following view of the history of the relation between
[67] Aristotle had already stated: "Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species" (S. H. Butcher, ed., Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art , New York, 1951, 77).
the two. As is well known, philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes, and Kant or Popper, who all had very strong epistemological leanings, were unanimously critical of metaphor. For them metaphor is a perversion of scientific rigor and clarity. But we should not interpret their hostility as meaning that metaphor and epistemology are quite different things. The opposite is true: epistemologists hated metaphor because they were vaguely aware that epistemology and metaphor are each other's rivals in the task of guiding the human mind. They wanted epistemology to perform in a better, more final, and more definitive way the job that was only incidentally and haphazardly performed by metaphor. Just as the modem state is a monopolization of the individual citizen's capacity for violence, so epistemology wanted to monopolize metaphor in one immensely powerful and omnipresent (epistemological) metaphor. Three conclusions follow from this. First, we may expect that disciplines that have always demonstrated an anarchistic resistance to the monopolization of metaphor by epistemology—and the writing of history is the best example of such a discipline as is recognized by current theory of history[68] —will continue to make a relatively free use of metaphor. Second, we may expect that as soon as the hold of epistemology begins to weaken, metaphor will make its reappearance on the scene. Mary Hesse's views on the metaphorical character of the sciences are an example in point.[69] Third, because of the inherently metaphorical character of epistemology, we may expect to find a master-metaphor at the end of all epistemological systems. A metaphor, that is, which is supposed to supersede all other metaphors; a metaphor which is tantamount to the Goethean Urphänomen of metaphor and is a limit beyond which we cannot go.
It is not at all difficult to be more specific about the nature of this master-metaphor. What we ordinarily find at the end of epistemological argument is typically an optical or spatial metaphor. And who could resist the seduction of spatial metaphor when we are asked to define epistemologically the relation between these two "parallel planes" of language and reality? One may think here of Descartes's notion of the idées claires et distinctes, with its obvious reliance upon a metaphor of visual perception in
[68] Perhaps the statement requires qualification. Contemporary theory of history often presents itself in the cloak of historiography. But this "new" historiography is different from the traditional history of historical writing, as we find it in the textbooks by Fueter or Barnes. Contemporary historiography, since Harden White's influential work, often has the form ora textual analysis demonstrating "what made the historical text possible." Thus, in a way reminiscent of Foucault, epistemological preoccupations still inspire much of contemporary historical theory, though the nature of these epistemological concerns differs conspicuously from those of some twenty rears ago.
[69] M. B. Hesse, "Models, Metaphor and Truth," in F. R. Ankersmit and J. J. A. Mooij, eds., Metaphor and Knowledge , Dordrecht, 1992.
terms of which Descartes phrases his criteria for epistemological certainty. We can think, furthermore, of how Wittgenstein has popularized the notion of the Kantian transcendental self by requiring us to imagine an eye that can only see what is within its field of perception but cannot see itself. And Wittgenstein's own assertion that "the sentence is a picture [my emphasis] of reality" provides us with another example.[70] But undoubtedly the best proof of epistemology's perennial fascination with spatial and optical metaphors can be found in Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Insofar as Rorty provides us in the first half of his book with a history of epistemological thought (a history he is, in fact, using for a "deconstruction" of the whole epistemological tradition), it is an integral part of his enterprise to demonstrate the extent to which optical metaphors, like the one of our "glassy essence" or the one of language or the mind being a "mirror" of reality, have always determined the nature and the content of epistemological thought.[71]
If we now take a look at the writing of history and historical thought we will encounter a roughly similar picture. As everybody will realize, spatial metaphors have always been quite popular in historical theory. Subjectivists liked to use the hackneyed metaphor of the "spectacles of the historian" that "color" his "view" of the past; next we find the ubiquitous and virtually obligatory metaphors of historical "insight," of "perspective" (Nietzsche), of conspectus (Cassirer), or of point of view (a metaphor to which I shall return in a moment). And in order to contest the argument that spatial metaphors only occur in impressionistic accounts of the nature of historical knowledge, I would like to recall Foucault's rapture with spatial metaphors, for instance his epistemological fields that ought to be or-thogonalistically projected onto the plane of historical representation.[72] However, if we wish to get hold of what comes closest in historical theory to an epistemological "master-metaphor," we can best turn to a most suggestive spatial metaphor proposed by L. O. Mink. Mink argues that the historian's task is essentially one of synthesis and integration: the historian must effect in his work what Mink refers to as a configurational comprehension of the different constituents of the past. Furthermore, within this configurational comprehension, the historian aims for an integration as complete as possible of the events related at the beginning of his historical narrative with those of the end—and with everything between:
But in the configurational comprehension, the end is connected with the promise of the beginning as well as the beginning with the promise of the
[70] L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , London, 1961, section 4.01.
[71] R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Oxford, 1980, 42ff.
[72] H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralisrn and Hennentutics , Brighton, 1982, 85ff.
end, and the necessity of the backward reference cancels out, so to speak, the contingency of the forward reference. To comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once and thus time is no longer the river which bears us along but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream in a single survey.[73]
The spatial metaphor thus suggests a "deconstruction" of time through space, in the sense that temporal succession is nullified thanks to the point of view located in a space outside the river of time itself.
I want to emphasize that Mink's metaphor is in agreement with how historism traditionally conceived of the nature of historical knowledge—and the implication is, of course, that because of their shared reliance upon a spatial metaphor, historism is inspired by the same mentality as epistemology in its effort to provide science with a sound epistemological foundation. First, it should be observed that Mink's configurational comprehension is identical to the historical ideas which, according to Humboldt, in his famous essay on the historian's task, the historian should discover in the manifold of the historically given.[74] Both the configurational comprehension and the historical idea individuate a point of view from which the past can be seen as a coherent unity. But what is more important, Ranke in his theoretical writings used exactly the same metaphor as Mink. Thus Oadamer quotes Ranke as follows: "I imagine the Deity—if I may allow myself this observation—as seeing the whole of historical humanity in its totality (since no time lies before the Deity), and finding it all equally valuable."[75] Ranke places God here in a transhistorical place that is formally identical to the point of view outside the flow of time, where Mink located the historian in his attempt to gain a survey of a part of the past. And Gadamer comments that Ranke invokes here the notion of an infinite understanding (intellectus infinitus ), for which—and this is in agreement with the suggestion of Mink's metaphor—everything takes place at one and the same time (omnium simul ). The infinite intellect or understanding that the historist historian strives for effects a supersession of time; a supersession that is ultimately realized in the mind of God. Indeed, this is the kind of
[73] L. O. Mink, Historical Understanding , eds. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T Vann, Ithaca, 1987, 56-57.
[74] Humboldt, Ranke ,14. Humboldt discusses here the notion of the historical idea.
[75] Quoted in Gadamer, Truth , 185. The crucial role played by point of view in historical writing was already recognized by the German eighteenth-century scholar Johann Martin Chladenius:
We cannot avoid that each of us looks on the story according to his point of view and that we also retell it according to that point of view. . .. A narration wholly abstracted from its own point of view is impossible, and hence an impartial narration cannot be called one that narrates without any point of view at all, for such simply is not possible. (See Gossman, Literature , 230.)
understanding of the past that is the final aim of all historist understanding of the past. As Ranke says himself, the more the historian succeeds in thinking historically in the way just defined, "the more his thought is Godlike."[76]
At this stage it must be pointed out where the historist and the postmodernist nostalgic views of the past crucially differ. As we have seen, the postmodernist, nostalgic experience of the past rejects a dissociation of the present from the experience of the past: the experience of the past is the experience of a difference between the past and the present, from which the latter eo ipso cannot be detached. This is quite different in his-torism. It is true that the historist will also see "differences," but these are always differences within the past itself (as , for instance, the distance in the past corresponding to the beginning and the end of the river of time that is surveyed by the historian in Mink's metaphor). The present, the historian himself, is no ingredient in this difference. For the historian is reduced to a merely transcendental, transhistorical self without an empirical (temporal or historical) self. Here we find another explanation of why traditional (historist) philosophy of history was not interested in developing a critique of historical experience or doing for the writing of history what eighteenth-century philosophy had done for science. Historist historical theory excluded the realm of (historical) experience from its considerations. Evidently, to contrast historist and postmodernist historical theory in this way is tantamount to criticizing historism for its tendency to place the historian in the God-like position Ranke had in mind for him. Our next step will now obviously be to ask ourselves how the historist can amend his mistake within the matrix of his historical theory.
One way of effecting such a correction would be to place the historical subject in an extension of the flow of Mink's river of time. And, indeed, as I have tried to show in an analysis of Tocqueville's L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, such a solution is possible. However, the price the historist will have to pay for this solution is high (and will probably exceed the amount of intellectual capital he has at his disposal). For, as will become clear if we visualize Mink's metaphor, the disappearance of the metaphorical point of view, on a safe hilltop high above the river of time (that has now been exchanged for the point the river of time has now reached), will also mean that the possibility of surveying the flow of time has disappeared, and history hence becomes essentially unnarratable. And, indeed, such a destruction of narrative takes place in the work by Tocqueville just mentioned. Metaphor, point of view, and all that the historist likes to associate with
[76] Gadamer, Truth , 186.
these then lose their function, and what remains is a past that is nothing more than a system of variations on a single theme.[77]
Because of these problems which we run into when opting for the above correction of historism's shortcomings, we are well-advised to consider Gadamer's solution for the historist's predicament. Gadamer's characterization of the historist's problem is as follows. He correctly points out that what most needs correction is the historist's decision to place the historian himself outside the flow of historical time; indeed, the major insight informing the whole of Gadamer's magnificent study is "that we only understand historically because we are ourselves historical beings.[78] Gadamer shows, next, that since Grimm, Gundolf, and Dilthey, there has been no lack of attempts to effect such a historicization of the historical subject.[79] But these attempts, Gadamer argues, never bore fruit—and consequently historical thought always remained swaddled in the tight cloth of an epistemological historism.
The lack of success of these earlier attempts to be a "consistent" his-torist (if the historist wishes to historicize everything, how could he possibly exclude himself from the process?) already suggests that a historicization of the historical subject is not an easy task. First, there is the problem of relativism that will result from the historicization of the historical subject. But the problem of relativism is not an interesting one from the present point of view. Relativism results when we historicize the historical subject and historical knowledge but nevertheless retain a nostalgia for absolute, transhistorical certainties. If we bear in mind the way that historism placed the historical subject in a transcendental position, we will see that, in this context, the problem of relativism is merely a restatement of the problem at hand in this discussion rather than the addition of a new dimension to it.
A more interesting problem is that the historicization of the historian and historical knowledge effects a coalescence of the level of the writing of history and that of historiography (the history of historical writing). Whereas, the historicization of, for example, physics, need not obliterate our capacity to distinguish clearly between the discussion of physical reality on the one hand and the history of scientific debate on the other; in the case of history, we cannot be so confident about the possibility of telling historiography apart from history itself. The explanation is, of course, that an easy and straightforward distinction between the object
[77] See my "Tocqueville and the Sublimity of Democracy," The Tocqueville Review XV (1994).
[78] Gadamer, Truth, 203.
[79] Gadamer, Truth , 267.
level and metalevel is more complicated here since we are dealing with the same discipline (that is, history) at both levels. One level will unavoidably become contaminated with the problems of the other. Surely, this is a problem that is not completely new to historical theory and practice. As far as theory is concerned, one may think of Hegel's philosophy of history. According to Hegel, historical insight itself is an integral part of the plot of history, since historical insight into the historical process of the self-realization of the Spirit is the very essence of history.[80] Thus the history of historical insight became part of the plot of history itself. With regard to historical practice, we will observe that historians generally consider the history of historical debate about a certain historical issue as not merely a propaedeutics to new historical insight but as a crucial part of it. This is especially true for domains of history like intellectual history. If we study contemporary interpretations of, say, Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau, we will acknowledge that it is impossible to say where a discussion of previous interpretations leaves off and a discussion of Locke or any of the other political thinkers themselves begins. Both levels of debate are inextricably bound up in the practice of intellectual history.
And here, then, we encounter the aporia of a consistent historism that has the courage to historicize the historical subject too. If we opt for this historicization of the historical subject, the historist metaphor that was so aptly formulated by Mink will disintegrate into incoherence. For, a metaphorical view of the past itself —as such—is now no longer possible; what misleadingly announces itself as such a view has become indiscernible from the fluctuating positions of historical writing. Points of view mingle with points of view on points of view, and the past itself with interpretations of the past. The spatial metaphor of the point of view destroys itself.
After having become aware of this problem of historism's self-destruction—if it really has "le courage de ses opinions"—we must return to Gadamer again. For with an appeal to the concept of "effective-history" (Wirkungsgeschichte ), Gadamer has made an impressive attempt to solve the aporias of historism and to move to a historical hermeneutics in which the transcendentalist proclivities of traditional historism have been overcome. "True historical thinking," writes Gadamer,
must take account of its own historicality. Only then will it not chase the phantom of an historical object which is the object of progressive research, but learn to see in the object the counterpart of itself and hence understand
[80] Spirit is, for Hegel, both historical consciousness and an active principle: "Der Geist handelt wesentlich, er macht sich zu dem, was er an sich ist, zu seiner Tat, zu seinem Werk; so wird er sich Gegenstand, so hat er sich als ein Dasein vor sich" (G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band I. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte , Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1970, 67).
both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other [as in the nostalgic experience of the past], a relationship in which exist both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. A proper hermeneutics would have to demonstrate the effectivity of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as "effective-history" (Wirkungsegeschichte ). Understanding is, essentially, an effective-historical relation (ein wirkungsgeschichtlicher Vorgang ).[81]
So Wirkungsgeschichte is not merely an auxiliary discipline of history, like that most peculiar discipline of the history of historical writing (commonly referred to as historiography). Historiography in its traditional form—one may think here of the books by Fueter, Iggers, or Breisach, whose value I respect no less than those of their historist counterparts in the domain of historical writing—has a most artificial cognitive status since it repeats at the level of the objectification of historical writing that same isolation or transcendentalization of the historical subject that we found in historism at the level of historical writing itself. Historiography, contrary to appearances, is not a fulfillment of the Gadamerian requirement of the historicization of the historical subject but is, in fact, a double refusal to do so. Thanks to this double refusal, an artificial no-man's-land is created between historiography and the writing of history that automatically robs historiography of the value it ought to have, in Gadamer's view, for the writing of history. According to Gadamer, the historicization of the historical subject should not result in a mere multiplication of layers in historical thought or writing: historicization must become part of historical writing itself. Only if we recognize that an awareness of Wirkungsgeschichte is, before all, an awareness of the hermeneutic situation, shall we be able to effectively vindicate the inconsistencies of historism.
Nevertheless, the objections formulated against traditional historiography in the previous paragraph may also make us suspicious of Wirkungsgeschichte. For we may wonder whether there is really an alternative to traditional historiography as the notion of Wirkungsgeschichte suggests. What, in fact, is Wirkungsgeschichte? Let us grant Gadamer that we can never obtain full and definite knowledge of Wirkungsgeschichte because of the inherent limitations of historical knowledge: "That we should become completely aware of effective-history is just as hybrid a statement as when Hegel speaks of absolute knowledge, in which history would become completely transparent to itself and hence be raised to the level of a concept."[82] Surely, this would not be a convincing argument against the notion of Wirkungsgeschichte; for the same could be said of a historical notion like the French Revolution, a notion that we could never do without and do
[81] Gadamer, Truth , 267.
[82] Gadamer, Truth , 268.
not hesitate to use. The fundamental problem is, rather, that there can be no end to the process of historicization of historical insight as will be required if the notion Wirkungsgeschichte is to stand for, or at least refer to, some aspect or phase in historical writing. The term suggests that there is a nameable entity we can refer to by the term Wirkungsgeschichte (what else might justify the use of the term?), but any attempt to identify that entity can only mean that we will push it further away again. To give content to the notion Wirkungsgeschichte is like the attempt to jump over one's shadow. For why stop with Wirkungsgeschichte, and why should we not historicize Wirkungsgeschichte itself (and so on indefinitely)? Thus Wirkungsgeschichte dissolves itself into an endless proliferation of historical self-reflections within an ever expanding historiographical present.
This is, nevertheless, how I propose to conceive of Wirkungsgeschichte. According to this proposal the notion does not refer—as is suggested by Gadamer's use of it—to a certain history or to a certain historical interpretation of historical debate. For me Wirkungsgeschichte is not a newly devised model for traditional historiography, and it does not possess an identifiable origin either in an objective past or in a completely comprehended tradition of historical analysis; for me Wirkungsgeschichte is a movement. It is a movement which is perpendicular to the flow of Mink's river of time and in which the historicization of Mink's configurational comprehension has neither origin nor end. As such, the movement of Wirkungsgeschichte is, paradoxically, both the fulfillment and the death of historism. It is its fulfillment since Wirkungsgeschichte no longer excludes the transcendental historical subject standing on his safe hilltop from historiciza-tion; it is the death of historism since the historist points of view that always allowed historist transcendentalism to historicize the past have lost the fixity that was essential for their ability to function as point of view. In the movement of Wirkungsgeschichte, points of view absorb points of views and since there is no end to the movement there can be no final or "master" point of view from which we can evolve and reconstruct the previous and more elementary ones. Thus, the most consistent and radical form of historism is, at the same time, the transcendence of historism.
In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which is partly an investigation of the fate of spatial and optical metaphors in the history of epistemology, Rorty ends with an exposition of what he sees as the consequence of Gadamer's destruction of epistemological pretensions. Rorty's equivalent of Gadamer's Wirkungsgeschichte is what Rorty refers to as the editing philosopher. Just as Gadamer's Wirkungsgeschichte results in the abandonment of all "striving towards stability,"[83] a striving which had always been at the
[83] Gadamer, Truth , 208.
very heart of epistemology, so Rorty's edifying philosopher has surrendered all pretense to fix once and for all a "vertical" link between language and reality. The edifying philosopher knows that everything he says and writes is part of "the conversation of mankind" and that what most counts is how what he says relates "horizontally" to what was and will be said before and after him.[84] The philosophers who agree with Gadamer's argument will therefore, Rorty writes,
present themselves as doing something different from, and more important than offering accurate representations of how things are. They will question the notion of "accurate representation," but, in order to be consistent, the edifying philosopher must also avoid taking the position that "a search for accurate representations of. . . (e.g., 'the most general traits of reality' or 'the nature of man')" is an inaccurate representation of philosophy. Whereas less pretentious revolutionaries can afford to have views on lots of things which their predecessors had views on, edifying philosophers have to decry the very notion of having a view, while avoiding having a view about having views.[85]
In other words, the historicization of (historical) points of view not only makes them hard to identify (which would be the relativist query) but puts us in the paradoxical position that we should adopt the point of view of not having a point of view. Metaphorizing metaphor—as happens in Wirkungsgeschichte—means the elimination of metaphor and hence of the whole epistemological apparatus originating in metaphor. It results in the oxymoron of "the point of view of the absence of points of view."